“I think she knew she wasn’t coming back,” Bea said. Bea gave them to Teddy before she died, because he was, literally, the only other person in the world who remembered Hannie, and thus it was that Bertie wore the earrings on her wedding day, a day that sadly Teddy didn’t live to see. She married in winter, to the man she met by chance on Westminster Bridge, in a Saxon church in the Cotswolds, and wore antique lace and carried a bouquet of snowdrops. After some argument she allowed Viola to give her away. It was perfect.
The next day, Sunday, Keith and Teddy caught an early train to Fox Corner, where Sylvie had made a great fuss about inviting them to lunch. Keith was enthusiastic, he had visited before and charmed Sylvie. He also knew how well stocked her larder was. Ursula declined to come with them. “Mother can have you all to herself,” she said and laughed rather wickedly.
Teddy took Keith round to Jackdaws to meet Mrs. Shawcross, who was always keen—keener than Sylvie, perhaps—to meet any members of Teddy’s crew who came down to Fox Corner with him. He was able to tell her that he had seen Gertie, and Mrs. Shawcross said, “How exciting, but I worry about her so. One thinks about Amy Johnson, you know.” Millie was “briefly” in residence and flirted outrageously with Keith. “That girl ought to be chained up,” he laughed when they finally escaped her clutches. “Not my type,” he said. He was still rather smitten with Hannie, Bea’s friend. “Can’t imagine taking her back to the sheep station though,” he said. Keith never doubted that he would be going back to Australia, and Teddy took a lot of comfort from his certainty. “She’s Jewish, you know,” Keith said.
“I know.”
“First Jewish person I’ve met,” Keith said, as if amazed. (“Jewess,” Sylvie would have said.) “It must be nice to fall in love,” he added, revealing a surprisingly romantic side. “Follow your heart and all that.”
“Steady on,” Teddy said. “You’re beginning to sound like a matinée idol” (or a woman). Months later, Teddy himself “fell in love.” He followed his heart and it led him up a blind alley, a dead end, but he didn’t mind that much.
A romantic interlude.
Julia. She was tall and fair, neither of which were attributes that Teddy usually found attractive in a woman. “A natural blonde,” she pointed out. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those,” Teddy said. “Now you have,” she said and laughed. She threw her head back when she laughed in a way that could have been crude but was actually charming. She wasn’t one of those women who covered their mouths when they laughed but then she had nice teeth, creamy and very pearly. (“Good breeding,” she said. “Good dentistry too.”) She laughed a lot.
She had been to school with Stella and Stella had told Teddy to “look Julia up” when he was in London, which was selfless of Stella. “Don’t fall in love with her,” she warned (priming the pump). “She’s broken the hearts of better men than you.” Even though Stella didn’t know a better man than Teddy.
Teddy didn’t want to die without falling in love and, as he expected to die at any given moment, he undoubtedly forced the hand of Cupid into giving him a taste of wartime romance. He was ripe for it.
Julia was in the ATS, working in a garage in central London, driving Army lorries. There was always a smear of oil or grease on her and her fingernails were filthy. Nonetheless she always turned heads. It came as naturally to her as the blonde hair. She was the sort of girl who always had good restaurant tables, good theatre seats, the sort of girl who people gave things to. There was something dazzling about her, a kind of glamour that spelled people. Spelled Teddy. For one whole week.
She “wangled” some leave after their first dinner together. First night together too. (“No point in hanging about, darling,” she said, unbuttoning his uniform jacket.) She was the kind of girl who could wangle leave. “Pa knows everyone.” Pa was an “adviser to the government,” whatever that meant, but let his only golden child run wild and free. She was twenty-two, not a child. Mummy was dead. “So sad.”
Julia had “pots of money”—Pa was also a lord. Teddy had been at school with the sons of plenty of lords and wasn’t put off by her breeding, although he couldn’t help but be a little impressed by the enormous mansion near Regent’s Park that was the family’s “London house.” They had “an ancestral pile” in Northamptonshire and “a place” in Ireland. “Oh, and an apartment in Paris that some disgusting Gauleiter is currently occupying.” Pa had moved out, staying somewhere in Westminster, and Julia had a flat in Petty France.
The London house was shut up for the duration. Everything had simply been left where it was, shrouded in dust-sheets. The enormous chandeliers still hung from the ceilings beneath their covers, looking like awkwardly wrapped presents. Valuable paintings had cloths hung over them as if the house was in mourning. An odd assortment of dust-sheets and old bed linen—and some not so old—had been flung over the furniture. Teddy discovered a Louis XV couch beneath a candlewick counterpane, a magnificent Louis XIV Boulle commode draped in a sheet, a writing desk that had apparently belonged to Marie Antoinette with an eiderdown stuck on top of it. He found a Gainsborough beneath a tea-towel. He fretted for their safety. “Aren’t you worried about these things?”
“Worried?” (It wasn’t a word in her vocabulary, she was criminally carefree, it was what attracted him to her.)
“That someone will steal them or they’ll be destroyed by a bomb?”
Julia just shrugged and said, “We have loads of this kind of stuff.”
He lifted the veil on a small Rembrandt every time he passed it on the staircase. No one would miss it, he thought. Did such careless people even deserve such treasure? If he took the Rembrandt his life would be quite different. He would be a thief, for one thing. A different narrative.
There were a couple of Rubenses, a Van Dyke, a Bernini in the hall, all kinds of Italian Renaissance treasures. But it was the little Rembrandt that stole his heart. He could have robbed the entire house. There was a key beneath an urn at the front door. When he chided Julia for the lack of security she laughed and said, “Yes, but it’s a very heavy urn.” (It was.)
“You can have it as far as I’m concerned, darling,” Julia said when she caught him looking at the Rembrandt. “It’s a murky old thing.”
“Thank you, but no.” What a pillar of moral rectitude. In later life, he wished he had appropriated the painting. No one would have believed it was a genuine Rembrandt, it would have existed entirely for his own guilty pleasure, hanging on a suburban wall. He should have done. The London house was hit by a V-2, the Rembrandt lost for ever.
“You can keep your art as far as I’m concerned,” Julia said. “I’m very shallow, I’m afraid.” In Teddy’s experience people who claimed to be one thing were generally the opposite, although in Julia’s case it was true. She was magnificently philistine.
They didn’t go to Petty France. Instead they spent their romantic interlude in the London house or, on one memorable night in which sleep played no part, at a suite in the Savoy that seemed to be permanently available to her. There were “gallons” of champagne in the cellar of the London house and they spent the week drinking it and making love on top of a variety of priceless antiques. It struck Teddy that it was possible that Julia lived her life like this all the time.
She had a perfect body, the Grecian-goddess type. He could imagine her as a goddess, cool and indifferent, quite happy to condemn some poor Actaeon to be torn to death by hounds. Nancy could never inhabit the cruel world of Olympus, she was more of a merry pagan sprite.
“Who is Nancy?”
“My fiancée.”
“Oh, darling, how sweet.”
He was rather put out by her response. The piquancy of a little jealousy would have added to the whole experience. That’s what it was, an experience, his heart was never truly engaged. He was playing at romance. This was after Hamburg, after Beethoven, after Keith died, not long before Nuremberg, when he didn’t care too much about anything, particularly beautiful shallow
blondes. But he appreciated the gift of having unfettered, lusty sex (“Filthy,” as Julia put it), so that in later years when he returned to the more common-or-garden type he at least knew what it was to fuck with abandon. He wasn’t fond of the word but it was the only one that would do for Julia really.
On the last day of his leave he turned up at the London house and shifted the heavy urn to find no key, only a piece of paper bearing a scribbled message: “Darling, it was lovely, see you around, Jxx.” He rather resented being locked out of the house, he had begun to feel quite at home there.
Not long afterwards Julia was posted to an Army ordnance base and was one of seventeen people who were killed when a bomb dump accidentally exploded. Teddy was already in the POW camp by then and didn’t find out about this incident until years later when he read about her father’s death in his own newspaper (“Peer in sex scandal falls to death”).
He imagined Julia’s perfect white limbs broken and scattered like ancient statuary. It was old news, too old for him really to care—Nancy had just embarked on her illness. He hadn’t known about the London house either until he read it in the same newspaper article (“Many priceless works of art lost during the war”). He mourned the little Rembrandt more than he did Julia, who he hadn’t thought of for a long time.
But that was in the future. Now he was returning from Jackdaws with Keith and finding Fox Corner’s drawing room alive with guests. Sylvie had invited people for lunch, people Teddy had never met and in whom he had little interest.
There was a pontificating local councillor and his wife, a solicitor (a self-styled “old-fashioned bachelor”) who seemed to be lining himself up as a prospective suitor for Sylvie. There was also a widow, rather elderly, who complained a good deal, particularly about how hard the war had made her life, and finally a “man of the cloth,” as Sylvie referred to him. Not just an ordinary cleric but a bishop—a superior kind of devil-dodger. He was rather unctuous, as Teddy expected a bishop to be.
They were drinking dainty glasses of sherry—the men too—and Sylvie said to Keith and Teddy, “I expect you would prefer beer.”
“I wouldn’t say no to a jar, Mrs. T,” Keith replied, at his most affably Australian.
Sylvie seemed to have assembled a cast list of characters for a banal farce. It was the kind of bourgeois society that she had little time for usually and Teddy couldn’t work out why she had chosen to broaden her social circle with the great and the good of the parish. It was only when she started making a performance out of pointing out his medal ribbons and boasting about his “brave deeds”—even though he had told her virtually nothing about his “deeds,” brave or otherwise—that he began to suspect that she was showing him off to this collection of worthies. He found he had absolutely nothing to say when they urged him to recount some of his “feats of derring-do” and it was left to Keith to entertain them with humorous accounts of their exploits, so that the war began to sound like a series of madcap escapades, rather like one of Augustus’s adventures.
“But still,” the bachelor said, in search of something more barbaric, “it’s not all fun and games. You’ve certainly been bombing the daylights out of Jerry.”
“Yes, well done,” the local councillor said pompously. “A good show. Hamburg has been a great success for the RAF, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, well done, lads,” the bishop said, making a slight toasting gesture with his sherry glass. “Now let’s get the rest of them.”
All of them, Teddy wondered?
I should warn you,” Ursula had written to Teddy, “that the pig has been killed.” Teddy had met Sylvie’s pig on several occasions since its arrival as a rotund pink piglet. He had rather admired the pig. It had no pretensions to grandeur, snuffling and truffling around in its knocked-together pen, grateful for any scraps that came its way. And now, apparently, the poor creature was being packaged up as bacon and sausages and ham and all the other products that a pig was destined to be in its afterward. To be hawked around for money by spivvy Sylvie, presumably.
They were to eat roast leg of pork with vegetables from the garden and apple sauce bottled from last autumn’s apples, and a Queen of Puddings provided mostly by the overworked chickens. Teddy couldn’t help but think of the pig when it was alive, still in possession of four sturdy legs.
“Everything from Fox Corner,” Sylvie said proudly, “from the pig on the table to the jam and eggs in the pudding.” Perhaps she was advertising her household economy to the bachelor. Or the bishop. Teddy couldn’t imagine his mother remarrying. She had settled into a rather stout, self-satisfied middle age and enjoyed having her own way.
“That’s a smell to raise a man’s spirits,” the bishop said, raising his refined episcopal nose to sniff the roasting pig.
“You’re very ingenious to be so self-sufficient, my dear,” the solicitor said to Sylvie, draining his sherry from the tiny glass and looking round hopefully for a decanter.
“There should be medals for women on the home front,” the councillor’s wife grumbled, “for our ingenuity, if not for everything we have to suffer,” a remark that provoked more grousing from the elderly widow. (“Suffering! Tell me about it.”)
Teddy felt himself growing hot and restless. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, putting his glass of beer down. “All right, mate?” Keith said as he pushed past him. “Just need a bit of air,” Teddy said.
“Off to have a smoke,” he heard Keith say, making an excuse for him.
Teddy whistled for the dog, which he found outside, intent on studying the chickens safely interned behind the wire in their run. Lucky, obedient to the last, followed Teddy into the lane.
The dog slipped beneath the gate into the dairy herd’s field and then stopped in bewilderment at the sight of the cows. “Cows,” Teddy said. “They won’t hurt you,” he added, but the dog began barking wildly. It was both nervous and defiant, a mixture that was unsettling to the normally easy-going cows, and Teddy retrieved the dog before it could cause any trouble.
Hamburg had been a “good show,” he reflected. There had been perfect flying conditions in the run in over the North Sea and the Germans had jammed the wrong Gee chain so that the navigators were able to get reliable fixes on the target from the radio navigation system. (Let’s talk about something more interesting than the mechanics of bombing.)
After the long journey over the featureless dark of the North Sea it had been a relief to reach the German coast and see the route markers dropped by the Pathfinders, golden candles of fire spilling gracefully and dripping to earth, marking their wicket gate, gathering and shepherding them towards the straight and narrow way of the bomb run. It had been emphasized to them at the briefing that the bomber stream needed to pack itself tightly, not only to concentrate the bombing but also so that Window, which they were using for the first time, could protect as many of them as possible. There had been some scepticism about the mysterious Window and in the briefing you would have thought that the boffins had come up with the holy grail, but in the event the crews were all as pleased as punch with it. Window was their new “secret weapon”—a kind of aluminium chaff.
Some aircraft had already been modified with a special chute, but most, like Q-Queenie, were still using their flare chute to deploy Window. It was a wretched job and Teddy had sent a very resentful Keith down to the freezing fuselage where, hampered by his portable oxygen bottle as well as a torch and a stopwatch, he had to perch next to the flare chute where, every sixty seconds, he had to remove the elastic from the awkward bundles and post them out of the aircraft. But, oh, the beauty of them, those long silvery streamers that fell to earth and snowed up the German ground radar so that their fighters couldn’t be vectored on to the bombers. They could see the searchlights roaming aimlessly around the sky while the blue master beams stood to helpless attention. The German ack-ack guns had nothing to aim at, so as they approached the city itself there was only a barrage of flak sent up in blind hope, like firecrackers on
Bonfire Night. They had reached the target without acquiring any real damage.
And what a target—2,300 tons of bombs and over 350,000 incendiaries in an hour. A world record. The first Target Indicators dropped over the city by the Pathfinders were fountains of red and gold, showering the earth below, and they were followed by lovely green ones, so that the overall effect was of jewelled fireworks cascading in the black sky. The coloured lights were joined by the bright quick flashes of the high explosive and the larger, slower explosions of the 4,000-lb cookies, and everywhere there was the enchanting twinkling of white lights as thousands upon thousands of incendiaries rained down on the city.
The intention was for the heavy bombs to blow open the buildings, taking the roofs off so that the incendiaries could fall and start fires, turning the buildings into fiercely burning chimneys. That’s what bombers did, they set fire to whatever was on the earth below them. It was tinder dry in the city, hardly any humidity, perfect conditions for finally showing Hitler (and the British government) what Bomber Command could do.
Q-Queenie had gone in on the second wave, behind the Pathfinders and the Lancasters who had already lit up the target for them.
It was like Christmas, the glitter and sparkle of incendiaries speckling the sky. Red fires were glowing everywhere although they soon began to be obscured by a dark pall of smoke. Keith talked them in, to the centre of this pyrotechnic display, “Left, right, right a bit more—” until Teddy heard him say “Bombs away” and they made for home as another four waves of bombers were still making their unharried way to the target.
They went to Essen the next night, another maximum effort, and then were stood down for a much-needed twenty-four hours while the Americans took over, two daylight raids on Hamburg, one after the other, stoking the fires with incendiaries and creating more with their high explosives. Teddy felt sorry for the American fliers—travelling in tight formation in daylight they took the brunt of the German defences. Q-Queenie had made an emergency landing at Shipdham USAAF base a few weeks ago and they had been given a rousing welcome. They hardly ever came across their Allied counterparts, so it was heartening to find themselves in the midst of an American squadron whose fliers were, as Tommy, their Geordie, put it, “Just like us.” Except shinier and newer, the gloss not quite as worn off, although it soon would be. And with much, much better food, so that when she eventually returned to her own station Q-Queenie was laden with chocolate and cigarettes, canned fruit and goodwill.
A God in Ruins Page 31